Azure Storage Explorer 4, Here at Last

I'm happy to announce that Azure Storage Explorer 4 is here at last, and Beta 1 is immediately available for download. It's been a long wait--a year since version 3 was put out--and we know many of you have been really hungry for an update that supports
some of the newer Windows Azure storage features such as root containers. Since versions 1-3 of Azure Storage Explorer pre-dated the commercial release of Windows Azure and the .NET Storage Client library, we felt strongly that a full rewrite was in order--and
that took some time to get to.

A reminder, this is a beta--as with all betas, you should exercise caution. Protect your storage, keep backups, and remember both humans and programs can make mistakes.

We think you'll find the WPF-based UI cleaner and more intuitive. There's tab-based support for opening multiple storage accounts. We're using the MVVM pattern.

With this release, we're putting out the source code openly and inviting the community to help us keep the code base well maintained and moving forward. Speaking of the code, it's in a good state; in past versions we had to use early sample code from the
Windows Azure SDK that was very large and complex. With version 4 and our use of the .NET Storage Client library the code is a lot more manageable and approachable.

BTW, those upgrading from version 3 will need to re-enter your storage account information for v4. There's a good reason for this: we've move the configuration file location to the user's application data area (in v3 you had to run with admin access in order
to save your configuration which was an annoyance).